When I went to my daughter’s parent-teacher meeting, I came face-to-face with the man who bullied me all through high school. The next day, the school called—my daughter had collapsed during PE, her body covered in bruises. As I arrived, he leaned close and whispered, “This is only the beginning. Just wait.” He thought I’d still be the scared kid I used to be. He had no idea who I’d become.

I drove home, walked into my home office, and opened my laptop.

Vance thought I was still the quiet, mousy girl from sophomore biology class. He didn’t know that I had spent the last decade climbing to the top of the legal food chain. I was currently the managing partner at Sterling, Rossi & Vance, one of the most ruthless, heavily connected, and universally feared corporate litigation firms in the state. I spent my days destroying multi-million-dollar corporations in federal court. Destroying a middle school gym teacher was barely going to require a warm-up.

I didn’t just have lawyers at my disposal. I had a small army of the best private investigators and forensic accountants money could buy.

I picked up my phone and called my lead investigator, a former FBI agent named Marcus.

“Marcus,” I said, my voice devoid of any emotion. “I need you to pull apart a man named Jason Vance. He is currently employed at Oakwood Middle School. I want his bank records, his internet search history, his disciplinary files, his credit report, and his phone records. I want to know what he eats for breakfast, and I want to know who he owes money to. I need it in forty-eight hours.”

“Consider it done, Elena,” Marcus replied.

Over the next two days, while I sat by Lily’s hospital bed, my phone buzzed incessantly with encrypted files from Marcus.

Jason Vance’s life was not the picture of a respectable educator. It was a rotting, hollow house of cards built on arrogance and vice.

Marcus uncovered that Vance was currently $85,000 in debt to a syndicate of illegal sports bookies operating out of the neighboring county. He was desperately moving money around to keep them from breaking his legs.

Furthermore, by hacking into the district’s archived HR servers, Marcus found three heavily redacted, sealed complaints from Vance’s previous employment at Westview High School. The complaints were filed by three separate female students, all detailing a disturbing pattern of physical intimidation, inappropriate aggressive contact, and verbal abuse. All three complaints had been quietly buried by the district superintendent and the union rep to protect the school’s athletic program, as Vance was the head football coach at the time.